Ryan Faughnder

Writer

Ryan Faughnder is an entertainment business reporter for the Los Angeles Times' Company Town, covering box office, the major Hollywood studios, the music industry and digital media. He previously wrote for the Los Angeles Business Journal and Bloomberg News. He holds a master’s in journalism from USC’s Annenberg School and a bachelor’s in English from UC Santa Barbara.

Recent Articles

Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Iger got a big pay bump last year. Iger’s total compensation hit $65.6 million in fiscal 2018, an increase of 80% from the prior year, according to a Friday regulatory filing. The surge was mostly due to a much larger stock bonus the Burbank entertainment...

Deepening anxiety in Hollywood that the ascendance of Netflix would keep people from going to the movies this year appears to have been overblown. Major hits, including Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther,” Universal Pictures’ “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” and 20th Century Fox’s “Deadpool 2,” drove...

Alfonso Cuarón’s critically acclaimed film “Roma” — an intimate, black-and-white, Spanish-language feature about a middle-class Mexican family and their live-in nanny — seems an unlikely candidate for the role of Hollywood disrupter. Nonetheless, the $15-million awards contender, which Netflix...

By the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe experienced its Big Bang with the 2008 smash “Iron Man,” Stan Lee had long since retired from official duties at Marvel, settling into a role as a revered spiritual grandfather to the comic book world, as close to a flesh-and-blood superhero as fans could...

James Gunn runs on the quicksilver creativity that Hollywood craves: His “Guardians of the Galaxy” films were wild rides of clever asides, many delivered by a gun-toting raccoon, that were innocent enough for children and sly enough for parents. The franchise re-imagined intergalactic hijinks and...

MoviePass was once the fastest rising star in Hollywood. The New York-based service promised to revolutionize the cinema business by offering something multiplexes have long resisted: steep discounts on the price of movie tickets. Consumers could watch a movie a day for about $10 a month — less...

Until “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” Walt Disney Co.’s efforts to continue the long-running space opera series were virtually unassailable. Disney’s first three “Star Wars” movies, starting in 2015 with “The Force Awakens,” paid off handsomely for the entertainment giant and its chairman and chief...

Byron Allen, the comedian-turned-media entrepreneur, has acquired the Weather Channel cable network as he seeks to build his TV and film business, he announced Thursday. Allen’s Los Angeles-based media company, Entertainment Studios, purchased Weather Group, the parent company of the Weather Channel...